Below is a brief overview of how to relocate to France for work in IT: what visa to expect, what salary is required for this visa, and how to adapt your resume to local traditions.
The current political situation.
Not out of butthurt, purely facts for. (c)
The situation now is that all non-EU immigrants, regardless of their level of education, are viewed as . In practice, this means a very high (over half) percentage of visa rejections — work residence permit for
specialists who did not study in France and earn less than 54 brut/year (about 3,000 euros/month net, use for conversion).
If your salary is above 54, you fall under European agreements on the 'blue card' (), and you are entitled to receive a work residence permit. Moreover, the blue card makes it much easier to relocate your family. With salarié, you either do everything synchronously — children and wife receive visas with you, arriving on the same tickets at the same time, or you arrive alone, wait a year and a half (!), apply for the incredibly bureaucratic procedure of regroupement familial, wait another 6-18 months, and only then bring your family over.
Therefore, for simplicity, we will consider relocation with a salary above 54.
54 — what is this level?
In fact, the figure of 54 is not arbitrary; it is one and a half average salaries in France.
Considering that the local system tends towards complete equalization, one and a half average salaries is significant; for example, we open , and see that the average salary of a Software Engineer = 58.
Local recruiters will tell you that 54 is a senior with 10 years of experience, but in reality, it depends on the region and your specialty. Salaries in Paris are about 5-10k higher than salaries in the south, while salaries in the south are about 5k higher than those in central France.
The most expensive are devops and full-stack guys, like "I can build anything you want on Django/React and deploy it on OVH (a local cloud service, very cheap and terrible)," as well as data scientists (especially in image/video processing). These categories can command their €54 even in the south, but if you’re from frontend or, for example, a Senior Java Finance developer, it’s better to look towards Paris right away. All of this is my personal impression of the current local market, but the situation is changing rapidly. Right now, American companies like Texas Instruments and Intel are leaving the southern market, while eastern giants like Huawei and Hitachi are actively expanding their presence. Both of these effects are driving up salaries in the south. At the same time, Facebook and Apple are coming to Paris, which is contributing to salary increases there — you can now leave Google for Facebook, whereas before, the salary increase scheme at Google involved the complicated process of “leave Google — start your own startup — return to Google.”
But that's already background; I can make a separate overview of salaries and how they are increasing if there’s interest.
What to write in a resume?
You're heading to a politically incorrect and intolerant country — you need to understand that right away.
For example: the hashtag #MeToo was translated almost identically in nearly all countries of the world (#яНеБоюсьСказать in Russia, #MoiAussi = "me too" in Canada), except for France. In France, it was localized as #BalanceTonPorc = "rat out your pig" (which is difficult to translate, actually, as it carries many politically incorrect connotations).
Therefore, if you are a white male, it can be beneficial to add a photo to your resume — it will work in your favor.
A standard resume should take up exactly one page, and the practice of "throwing away resumes longer than two pages for unprofessionalism" is quite common.
An exception is for data scientists with degrees and publications, where you are essentially a researcher working for industry.
If your education is not French and not relevant, just omit that section from your resume.
If CS — write it in a way that makes it clear it’s CS.
Regarding projects — do not write phrases like "2016-2018 NameBank / DevOps: Prometheus, Grafana, AWS."
Follow this scheme :
"DevOps in the technical department of a large bank, in a group of 10 people responsible for monitoring and preventing incidents."
Project: transition from a homemade monitoring system to Prometheus, 100 machines in production on AWS, with 3 people on the project, I am the project leader, project duration — one and a half years. What has been done: deployed a test system on one of the test machines in a couple of days and have been waiting for security approval for six months. Result: the boss is satisfied, the team received more funding after the presentation, and so on.
In conclusion — is this a good way to move to France — for work?
Answer: no, from personal experience — I had a work relocation — no.
My personal experience suggests that , if with a wife — then with two student visas, meaning both should enroll in studies.
Thus, it is easier for you to look for a job (after obtaining a master's degree, a visa is automatically granted which allows you to live and work in France for 1 year, making job search much easier because you are on the spot, can start tomorrow + French education), the time to obtain a European passport is reduced to about 3 years (from 6 years when relocating for work), and you have a priceless year to calmly learn the language in a natural environment (it is indeed very necessary, but in a natural environment, it is possible to learn comfortably up to B1 = basic conversational level in six months).
Regarding the wife — I often get asked in private messages, what if one comes with a student visa, and the wife does not want to work or study. There is an option to enroll the wife in studies so she can 'study', remaining for the second/third/fourth year while you look for a job, and then you can apply for citizenship together and obtain it in a year. This is often done by guys from Algeria and Tunisia, for example. The problem in this case is purely financial — it will be hard to buy an apartment + travel + have 2 cars for the family, but living in a rented place + traveling + 1 car is completely manageable. Hard in the sense — for one person to earn a salary equivalent to two developer salaries in IT, you need to be the head of about 50-100 people, or look for some very specific niche in Eastern companies — see above about data scientists, or for example, basic conversational Chinese has recently become very advantageous.
Thank you for reading.
Source: habr.com
